This is my second entry for this year’s an event apart 10k contest. It’s published right here. Go there, try it and put some comments!

All taxi drivers went on strike. You are the only one who can satisfy the needs of this city!

It’s a 3D top view car game where you have to take people from one place to another. It’s javascript based and has some beautiful features:

• 3D inside canvas HTML5 2D context. I had to develop some tricky functions to perform textured polygon rendering in basic canvas. WebGL was not allowed because the game had to work in browsers that don’t suppor that feature.
• Full physics for cars and city elements (such buildings, lamps, …). Cars move all around the city, trying not to crash with each other. But when they collide (or your taxi crashes with them) they do exceptionally well!


Taxi Strike 10k generated city fragment

• A big fully textured generated city. Due to the 10k contest limit I couldn’t afford using external graphics or city definition. With a couple of simple textures I’d reach the size limit! So I had to generate all the city an its graphics in load time. The generated city is cool! I’ve used some graph theory algorithms for creating roads, greedy algorithms to generate buildings and deterministic random numbers to obtain always the desired city. All graphics are vectorial. Some of them where drawn using inkscape and then converted to HTML5 canvas functions and optimized manually. And I think I’ve got a nice comic style!


Some Taxi Strike generated graphics

• Path finding. When you attend a call you are telling to go some place in a given time. Then, some arrows appear on the roads to help you reaching your goal, like using a GPS. That arrows mark the shortest path to your goal driving using the roads. But of course you can take shortcuts between buildings or through parks, taking less time and getting more points.
• And so much more. Lots of details to make all things work.

Drive your taxi and take people everywhere

I almost went crazy getting all that features in only 10 kilobytes. In the way I had to discard some ideas and remove some things I’ve already developed. For example there were pedestrians walking; the game worked on mobile platforms drawing some buttons to drive the car; and more things. It was a pity to throw away all the mobile logic, but that was too much code for 10k…

I will post some of the techniques used in this game when I have time. So come back soon and maybe yo will find new freaky entries!